31 October 2009

My initial reaction, upon looking at the bios of the 10 winners, was that they were rather more establishment, and more "WaPo Columnist" (read conservative and mindless difference splitters) than I had hoped.

But I kind of figured that this might be sour grapes on my part, so I would let their biographies, and their submissions, percolate through my brain before I drew a firm conclusion.

This is particularly notable because I am of the opinion that Drum spends too much time being a "mindless difference splitter", so he is coming from a place that is far closer to the WaPo editorial board than I am.

His take on the winners:

By the way, the ten winners include a Nobel Prize winner, a Bush 43 assistant secretary of commerce (guess which one), a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, an analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, a former researcher at the Kennedy School of Government, an Atlantic Media fellow, and a small-town newspaper editor. Not exactly a crowd of just plain folks. It might have been more fun to read the other 4,790 entries.

Well, that's a bit harsher than I would have been, but go and read the Drum's post...It's a good read.

In California, it looks like it will be Jerry Brown running as the Dem for Governor, because Gavin Newsome has quit the race, because of weak support and poor fund-raising.

Additionally, in the very odd special election for New York's 23rd Congressional district, Republican Dierdre Scozzafava has suspended her campaign, after coming up short on money and placing 3rd in recent polls.

The numbers were about 35% for Doug Hoffman, the Club for Growth approved Neanderthal, 35% for Bill Owens, the Democratic candidate about whom I know nothing, and about 25% for Scozzafava.

Her name will remain on the ballot, which is, I think a message to Hoffman that he should go Cheney himself, but I'm an engineer, not a psychologist, dammit!*

I think that this puts Hoffman the live dead girl/live boy† favorite in the overwhelmingly Republican district now, though I think that there are a number of people who will vote for Scozzafava anyway, because they do not want to vote for Hoffman, who is a carpetbagger with absolutely no interest in the real issues of the district, but cannot bring themselves to pull the "D" lever.

*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!

†Edwin Edwards, when discovering that he would be facing David Duke in the Louisiana governor's race, said that the the only way that he would lose were if he were, "caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy".

Something like ion drive, or plasma drive would likely cut transit time by at least ¾ for a manned trip to Mars, and if a ground base were established, a nuclear power supply would handle the reduced solar energy levels there.

The core of the allegations is that the president of the Security Management Institute (SMI), a private research company, was invited to a trade seminar in Sweden, and that SAAB covered his expenses, to the tune of $17,200.

There are a number of systems to deal with RPGs and similar threats, such as the US and Israeli active protection systems that shoot down incoming rounds, the slat armor used to predetonate HEAT rounds (shown, top), the cloth based TARIAN armor also used to predetonate armor (shown, Bottom), and now Textron has come up with the Tactical Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) Airbag Protection System (TRAPS), which uses sensors to detect an incoming round, and than uses an airbag to detonate the warhead far enough away from the hull to minimize damage. (no pictures, sorry)

There are a number of reasons that I am dubious.

The first is that it combines all the disadvantages of a passive system (single use) with those of an active system (expensive sensors), and also because it would appear to be particularly vulnerable to the tandem round system used in the RPG-30. (bottom 2 pictures)

I would also note that it does seem to suffer the same problem as all such systems developed under the Aegis* of the Pentagon:

The progress of TRAPS has not been as fast as one might expect. It was first unveiled at an Army trade show back in October 2006, after spending $3.5 million in Pentagon cash the previous year. Phase II testing is still to take place, and an operational system will be some way down the line. Janes notes the timing of the latest tests –- Textron is bidding to be part of the Army’s new Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) program.

Thankfully, there were only minor injuries at the crash, which occurred during an armed forced day celebration, but in keeping with my policy of never letting a crash with video and a happy ending go unnoticed, here it is.

I will say that it is kind of surreal how the marching band never misses a step in the video as the helo comes down.

Thank you for entering the first season of the America’s Next Great Pundit contest. You didn’t make the judging easy for us. Not only did we get nearly 5,000 entries, but a great many of those entries were really quite excellent -- smart, interesting, funny, well written and well argued. So while we’re sorry to say that we can’t include you as one of our ten finalists this time around, we hope this isn’t the last time we hear from you. We hope you’ll follow the rest of the contest and participate as voters. But even more important, we hope you’ll pitch us more of your work. The various ways you can send various types of pieces are outlined here:

Someone trying to capitalize on inside information using high speed trading (which, BTW, the NYSE does not do HFT, so it gets odd).

A deliberate attempt to take down reporting so some sort of funny business could get done in the dark.

In any case, a lot of people were trading blind as a result, which makes for much potential for mischief:

NYSE Euronext (NYX.N)(NYX.PA), the parent of the exchange, said the delays followed "an inordinate influx" of orders received as Friday's session got under way. Later in the session, the company had to temporarily transfer quote processing to a backup system before the problem was resolved around noon.

The exchange's quote delays caused some tickers to be locked, but a NYSE spokesman said trades were continuous throughout.

"It was an influx of erroneous orders which were caught before they were executed," said Ray Pellecchia. He could not say where the orders came from.

Yeah, and it could just be an ordinary f%$#-up, and I'm being a conspiracy nut.

Yesterday, I mentioned Obama's trip to Dover to pay his respects to the dead whose caskets were coming back that day.

I figured that at some point, some prominent Republican would try to cast it ad evil and sinister, and out of the gate comes Liz Cheney, on the John Gibson Show:

"I think that what President Bush used to do is do it without the cameras. And I don't understand sort of showing up with the White House Press Pool with photographers and asking family members if you can take pictures. That's really hard for me to get my head around...It was a surprising way for the president to choose to do this."

Only, neither George W. Bush or...You know....Her Father ever went to pay their respects to the dead.

In fact, they were they supporessed any and all photographs, whether the family assented or not.

Bank of America and Countrywide Home Loans destroyed mortgage documents, and "recreate" them by "insert(ing) data as they see fit," to cover up their own failure to keep records - or their fraud - according to a federal RICO class action.

"To cover up the servicing mistakes and fraud and misrepresentation in the servicing of a consumer escrow, Defendants 'recreate' letters, insert data as they see fit, and fail to produce the entire HUD complaint form. This way, a consumer is left in the dark about the fraud that occurred to them," the complaint states.

Lead plaintiff Kim Gorham says that when she sent a letter seeking information about her escrow account, she was informed that it had been "destroyed by a letter opener."

After repeated requests, Gorham, who is blind, received her purported escrow analysis, but it was "100 percent illegible," according to the complaint. The defendants knew that Gorham was legally blind, the complaint states.

She says that getting a "clear and concise" statement from the defendants has been an "impossible task."

Countrywide routinely responded to customers' requests for records by claiming they were "unavailable or destroyed," according to the complaint.

The lawsuit alleges that the records were destroyed, "in an attempt to suppress damaging information."

While not every lawsuit has merit, and a defendant should be presumed innocent, this certainly justifies a hearty, "Hoocoodanode?"

In a rather extensive article, they show how the increasingly private healthcare system is bankrupting ordinary Chinese:

China's health-care system is in disarray, a side effect of the market reforms that have spurred private enterprise and rapid growth since 1980. Before then, state-owned companies offered cradle-to-grave care, part of a system based on danwei, or work units, that provided health, education, pensions and other benefits. But as the economy has grown more diverse, an increasing number of Chinese have had to fend for themselves, with only a porous government insurance program to help.

While there are some problems with a shortage of medical facilities, particularly in the rural hinterlands, the problem is that people are having their lives destroyed by the costs that they must bear under an increasingly spotty system of healthcare access.

Nonetheless But further down, for reasons known only to God, reporter Steven Mufson feels compelled to bring in a complete idiot as an "expert":

China's State Council is eager to improve the situation but can't decide how. The government currently fixes the prices of all medical services, and doctors are treated -- and paid -- like public officials. But that has contributed to a shortage of doctors as many talented Chinese choose better-paid professions.

Some experts say more private spending and investment would improve the system. Gordon G. Liu, a professor of economics at Beijing University's Guanghua School of Management, said he would let people with means spend more money on care, which he said would increase the availability of care by giving doctors incentives to work harder and by luring more Chinese into the medical profession.

So this guy's solution is to raise prices, when the problem is not that there aren't enough doctors, but that it's already too expensive, because this will have doctors clamoring to treat all those rich people farming in rural areas?

Why on earth does the reporter feel compelled to bring this in to begin with? It has nothing to do with the problem described, and it is precisely the wrong thing to do.

It appears that Corning, age 66, was hanging out in his car at a graveyard with an 18 year old stripper, along with Viagra and sex toys, and when police officer Michael Wines showed up in a marked car, Corning, "attempted to make a hasty retreat, spinning the tires in the driveway and accelerating rapidly."

It gets better. When finally apprehended, the police verify who he is by calling the Attorney General's office, where his wife answers the phone, and then rats him out to the notifies Attorney General, who fires his flabby white ass.

The high point of the police report:

The search revealed a sex enhancement drug and some sex toys. According to the report, Corning told Wines he had a prescription for the medication and the other items were always in the car "just in case."

(emphasis mine)

Just in case....Yeah sure....I always carry sex toys and Viagra in my car....Why do you think that they call them "Jumper Cables."

29 October 2009

Listen to him here. He gets what is going on with Wall Street, and knows exactly what the monster is, and how to slay it.

Andrew Cuomo knows this about Wall Street too, and doesn't have that whole, "Hypocrite Mr. Clean who paid for Blow-jobs from a Skanky New Jersey Prostitute" vibe, so I prefer Cuomo.

Incumbent "accidental" Governor David Paterson, by contrast, has been very much in the pocket of Wall Street, fighting kicking and screaming about anything that could possibly inconvenience the "Masters of the Universe", and the Governor of New York needs to be more than that.

Seriously, and if a Republican takes the state house in 2010, it means that redistricting will remain what it is in New York, and we'll be stuck with an over-representation of Republicans in an overwhelmingly Democratic state.

It's how the 'Phants held the State Senate for 40 years.

Seriously, his numbers are so bad, that Rudolph Giuliani could beat him without running a campaign.

Even more impressively, Rudolph Giuliani could beat him if he did run a campaign, because if there is anything that the 2008 Republican Presidential primaries showed, it was that finding Rudy Giuliani on the campaign trail was a lot like finding a cockroach in your coffee.

Home Vacancy, Home Ownership Rates, and Rental Vacancy Rates Also Courtesy of Calculated Risk

Some Improvement on Homeowner Vacancy Rates

Note that the Rental Vacancy Rate is an All Time High

Thursday is the new jobless day, and new unemployment claims were basically flat, falling from 531,000 initial claims to 530,000. The 4 week moving average, a generally better metric, was down to 526,250, from the previous week's 532,250, and continuing claims fell to 5,797,000 down 148,000 from last week's 5,945,000.

Delta Air Lines, the world’s largest carrier, would be more likely to lose union elections sought by flight attendants and machinists if a proposal by the AFL-CIO is approved.

The workers asked the National Mediation Board in July and August to clear the way for an election. Last month, the AFL-CIO petitioned the board to revise procedures and allow a union if most of those voting approve, instead of a majority of all workers in the class.

The board plans to announce a proposal in coming days to advance the union request on voting rules, people familiar with the matter said. Seven Republican senators said in a Sept. 30 letter that the board was delaying a decision on the union election while it considers the new vote-counting method.

Yes, under the old system, a non-vote was counted as a no vote, so you could lose because someone got the sniffles, or just didn't want to be bothered to vote.

What's more, they are appointing people who are not management toadies to boards. In the case of the National mediation board, you have a former flight attendent union official replacing a former lobbyist for Northwest (now a part of Delta), and the President of Delta Airlines is pissed about it:

“You have two former heads of AFL-CIO unions at the NMB and they really are politicizing the process,” Delta CEO Richard Anderson said on a conference call with investors last week.

I understand it. If I were a worker on the Ford shop floor, and I had already made major concessions about 8 months ago, I'd want to make sure that the shareholders, including the Ford family, were wiped out before I would give anything more:

[UAW Local President Tom] Spears, who backed the contract changes, said in an interview. “The membership did not have a warm reception to additional contract modifications. We did this in ‘05, ‘07 and in February and now they’re back at us again.”

Of course, you will doubtless hear how these guys are being selfish and stupid, and have to give back more, but if you go through those same papers over the weeks before and after, you will find them defending the outrageous pay and bonus contracts as sacrosanct.

It's kind of like the Droit de seigneur, where of the local lord in the old days had the right to deflower any new bride, only with the banks, we all get f#$@ed.

But no journalistic operation is better prepared to sing the tragedy of its own martyrdom than Fox News. To all the usual journalistic instincts it adds its grand narrative of Middle America's disrespectful treatment by the liberal elite. Persecution fantasy is Fox News's lifeblood; give it the faintest whiff of the real thing and look out for a gale-force hissy fit.

The author, Thomas Frank, had better hope that Rupert Murdoch does not read the OP/ED page of his flagship newspaper.

Bush Jr. spent his entire term avoiding things like this, because he's a coward with no integrity.

The picture on the left is him saluting* the men as they are transported off the transport

Video below.

*I know that this is a picayune observation, as this is a genuine show of respect, but I thought civilians weren't supposed to salute, could someone with military experience please inform me on the finer points?

First, they learned their rates will rise by an average of 11 percent next year.

Next, they opened a slick flier from the insurer urging them to send an enclosed pre-printed, postage-paid note to Sen. Kay Hagan denouncing what the company says is unfair competition that would be imposed by a government-backed insurance plan. The so-called public option is likely to be considered by Congress in the health-care overhaul debate.

"No matter what you call it, if the federal government intervenes in the private health insurance market, it's a slippery slope to a single-payer system," the BCBS flier read. "Who wants that?"

Plenty of people, it turns out.

Indignant Blue Cross customers have rebelled against the insurer's message, complaining that their premium dollars have funded such a campaign.

They've hit the Internet in a flurry of e-mails to friends and neighbors throughout the state. They've called Hagan's office to voice support for a public option. They've marked through the Blue Cross message on their postcards to instead vouch support, then dropped them in the mail -- in at least one case taped to a brick -- to be paid on Blue Cross' dime. Or dimes.

(emphasis mine)

As the saying goes, "ない愚かさはない薬です".*

*Pronounced in Japanese, "baka ni tsukeru kusuri wanai", which means, "There is no medicine for stupidity."

28 October 2009

It turns out that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Hamid Karzai is multi-tasking something fierce, he's not just a major figure in Afghan opium production, but he is also on the CIA payroll:

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

The article then notes that this "raises questions" about our current Afghanistan policy.

Well duh!!! The army fights the Taliban, which is supported to a large degree by opium money, and the CIA pays money to one of the biggest opium producers and smugglers in the region, which would imply that in some small part, the CIA is paying the Taliban to kill American troops.

Would it surprise you to learn that survivors can suffer just as much, if not more, than colleagues who get laid off? It certainly surprised a team of academic researchers who embedded themselves at Boeing (BA) from 1996 to 2006, a tumultuous decade during which the company laid off tens of thousands. The results of the study will appear next year in a Yale University Press book called Turbulence: Boeing and the State of American Workers and Managers. "How much better off the laid-off were was stunning and shocking to us," says Sarah Moore, a University of Puget Sound industrial psychology professor who is one of the book's four authors. "So much of the literature talks about how dreadful unemployment is."

...

In the greatest surprise of all, the researchers discovered that the people who had been laid off often were happier than those left behind. Many had new jobs, even if they didn't always pay as well. Over and over, Moore says, average depression scores were nearly twice as great for those who stayed with Boeing vs. those who left. The laid-off were less likely to binge drink, often slept better, and had fewer chronic health problems.

(emphasis mine)

Boeing is claiming that morale has improved since they got the new company president it, but I kind of doubt that.

BTW, this kind of morale is one of the reasons that they are having the problems that they are having with the 787: When you outsource basic engineering to another firm, people in your firm, don't make the extra effort to examine things that look funny to them.

As another older banker and one who has experienced both the pre- and post-Glass-Steagall world, I would agree with Paul A. Volcker (and also Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England) that some kind of separation between institutions that deal primarily in the capital markets and those involved in more traditional deposit-taking and working-capital finance makes sense.

This, in conjunction with more demanding capital requirements, would go a long way toward building a more robust financial sector.

!So, it looks like yet another organization has had to downsize. It's moving out of its headquarters, in the heart of Washington, DC, which they moved into about a year ago, because it's too expensive for them now.

Who is this organization? Why it's the Mortgage Bankers Association, of course, who have discovered that their new $76 million dollar digs are no longer affordable:

Since the purchase in May 2008, the U.S. economy has suffered one of the most severe recessions in a century, and the residential and commercial real estate markets have materially deteriorated. These factors, coupled with a challenging leasing environment, led the MBA Board to conclude that continued ownership of 1331 L Street was economically imprudent, and over the long term would impair MBA's ability to continue providing our members with MBA's full range of services.

My guess? That they got f$#@ed over by the fine print in their mortgage.

I'm not sure why new home sales falling was "unexpected". They are recorded when the contract is made, and not when they close, whereas existing home sales are recorded at closing, which means that people who had not bought new homes by the end of August, were really pushing it to qualify for the first time buyer tax credit, which require that the deal be closed by the end of November.

27 October 2009

Time to stop telling horror stories. Federal agents are wasting their time slapping handcuffs on hedge fund traders like Raj Rajaratnam, the financier charged last week with trading on nonpublic information involving IBM, Google and other big companies. The reassuring truth: Insider trading is impossible to police and helpful to markets and investors. Parsing the difference between legal and illegal insider trading is futile—and a disservice to all investors. Far from being so injurious to the economy that its practice must be criminalized, insiders buying and selling stocks based on their knowledge play a critical role in keeping asset prices honest—in keeping prices from lying to the public about corporate realities.

Prohibitions on insider trading prevent the market from adjusting as quickly as possible to changes in the demand for, and supply of, corporate assets. The result is prices that lie.

Do you get it? It facilitates price discovery to allow people to make a profit with information that allows them to know which way the price is going.

This is much like the arguments for naked Credit Default Swap (CDS) contracts, where people are getting insurance for items in which they have no interest in its continued existence, and so give people a reason to burn down your house, or at least your bond, and it is just as vacuous.

OP/EDs generally don't mean much, but I think that the Times, at least in its unsigned editorials, is a barometer of a certain segment of the population, or at least that segment that doesn't live inside the DC Beltway, and as such, this could mean a trend.

I'd give it about 5 to 1 against it being a trend, but a week ago, I would have said 20 to 1.

Here is an interesting fact: If you retired from Delphi, the bankrupt GM parts supplier, and you are a member of the UAW, your pension is safe, because the Union fought for contractual assurances that it would be safe, but for non-union middle management? Not so much:

But four months later, Mr. Gump finds himself in a far more perilous condition than his neighbors.

On his street, he is the only Delphi worker whose pension benefits may be cut. His neighbors all belong to unions and have received a lifeline in an unprecedented deal related to the government-supervised bankruptcy of General Motors, the onetime parent of Delphi. (G.M. spun off the parts division as a separate company 10 years ago.)

Mr. Gump and some 21,000 other salaried workers and retirees are furious that their roughly 46,000 union co-workers at Delphi have had their benefits restored, apparently with government largesse, and they have not.

This is not "government largesse", of course, it's because the Union used its clout to protect its people, and got agreements and guarantees from GM as a result.

Mr. Gump, like myself, is an engineer, who as a group are tremendously resistant to the idea of unionizing, and this cost him, and thousands like him at Delphi.

"A bit of dithering might have been in order before we went into Iraq in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction," Will said on ABC's "This Week. "For a representative of the Bush administration to accuse someone of taking too much time is missing the point. We have much more to fear in this town from hasty than from slow government action."

When you have lost the guy who drilled Ronald Reagan for his debates with Jimmy Carter while using Carter's stolen briefing books, you've lost everyone.

Start watching at about -11:10. (the timer on the clip counts down, not up)

You've seen it, the various mash-ups that have been done with the German movie Downfall (Der Untergang), where people take a rant by Hitler, as played by Bruno Ganz, and subtitle it, so it appears that he is ranting about XBox games, losing a parking space, becoming a meme, or Super Bowl Results.

Well, it now appears that Constantin Film Produktion GmbH is hitting Youtube with a flurry of DMCA takedown demands. As Brad Templeton of the EFF Notes, this is absurd. The copies do no damage to the producers of the movie, and people are watching this short bit (about 4 minutes) for the subtitles, not the film.

He makes some very good points about just how absurd the hoops that he had to jump through in order to make the film in full accordance of the DMCA, despite the fact that this is clearly fair use.

Go read,

He also gets jiggy with the Hitler rant, only this time, Hitler is assuming the role of a studio executive, not much of a stretch, and trying to lock down the content.

It's very funny, and contains the classic line, "Have you seen how good that Führerbunker scene is? Bruno Ganz does a great Hitler!"

The proposal would require financial firms with more than $10 billion of assets to pay for the unwinding of a collapsed competitor. The measure would also give the Federal Reserve the power to direct any large financial holding company to sell or transfer assets or stop certain activities if the central bank determined there could be a "threat to the safety and soundness of such company or to the financial stability of the United States." This suggests the Fed would win new authority to order companies to shrink.

It's a good step, though I really don't want this under the Fed.

They have already proved themselves to be completely captured by Wall Street.

Yes, it appears that the US Chamber of Commerce, in a desperate bid for wankitude, had decided to sue the Yes Menfor their phony press release and press conference where they announced that the Chamber would support global warming legislation.

Here is a video of the press conference, complete with a real CoC representative bursting in and calling them out.

The bill was about allowing San Francisco to use certain sorts of public financing with regard to their waterfront.

It appears that Ahnuld unexpectedly showed up to the Democratic Party gala, and while the reception was hostile, Ammiano's was significantly more hostile than most of the rest of the people in the room.

He shouted, "You Lie," and then walked out of the Governor's speech saying that he should, "kiss my gay ass" which is an understandable reaction to a guy who vetoed Harvey Milk day.

Totally immature and classless, and so not surprising from a man who suggested that he wanted to flush Arianna Huffington's head down the toilet in the gubernatorial debates.

It appears that AIG had already negotiated haircuts, on the order of 60¢ on the dollar, for the credit default swaps, but then Geithner stepped in, and decided to pay the counter parties, which included, big surprise, that great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,* Goldman Sachs:

Part of a sentence in the document was crossed out. It contained a blank space that was intended to show the amount of the haircut the banks would take, according to people who saw the term sheet. After less than a week of private negotiations with the banks, the New York Fed instructed AIG to pay them par, or 100 cents on the dollar. The content of its deliberations has never been made public.

The argument was that some of the counter parties would have gone belly up if Geithner had not overpaid them, but I'm with John Carney of Clusterstock:

No doubt regulators would say that paying full price was necessary. But it was not.

A far better move would have been to transparently bailout firms that needed the additional capital instead of doing it in an under-handed way. Even better would have been to have forced those firms with too much exposure to AIG to seek out new capital in the markets, possibly converting debt to equity and wiping out existing shareholders. Goldman Sachs claims that it didn't need the AIG bailout bucks to survive--a claim whose truth we'll never actually know because of the bungled operation of the bailout.

Gee, I wonder why it was never made public?

Timothy Geithner should be fired, hell he should be fired and tarred and feathered.

*Alas, I cannot claim credit for this bon mot, it was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.

They had promised, "an upcoming television event devoted to the comedy of Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy, American Dad and The Cleveland Show" that would be, "unique Windows 7-branded programming that blends seamlessly with show content".

So far, so good, but what they also got was"

According to reports, Redmond marketeers sat in on the recording of the variety special. While Windows marketing messages were presumably seamlessly integrated into the schtick, so were jokes about deaf people, the Holocaust, feminine hygiene and incest.

While Microsoft was clearly reaching for a hip and edgy audience, they presumably meant the "check me out, I've got an extra shot in this latte and I'm wearing an Hawaiian shirt" kind of edgy.

I am wondering if these guys ever watched Family Guy or American Dad, because this is pretty much what he does for humor.

Or, to quote Eric Duckman:

Bunch of thin-skinned, no-humor pansies! You tell them an ice-breaker or two about women's libbers, gays, environmentalists, several minorities, the homeless, couple of religions, anorexics, obese people, the handicapped, old farts, baldness, and people who walk real goofy because they've just had a vasectomy, and suddenly, they get all sensitive, like I offended one of them or something!

Riverview Community Bank, an Otsego firm that attracted national media attention several years ago for espousing prayer in the workplace, has been shut down by state regulators....Early in its life, Riverview had a reputation for mixing faith and finance. Chuck Ripka, one of the bank's founders, once told the Star Tribune that God spoke to him and said, "Chuck, if you pastor the bank, I'll take care of the bottom line." Ripka and his staff would pray with customers in the bank's Otsego branch and even at the drive-up window. In a 2004 New York Times story, Ripka said he occasionally slipped up and said, "Come on over to the church -- I mean the bank."

Of course, this makes his bank hostile to non-Christian, or for that matter, non-obnoxious Christian, and as a public accommodation it also makes it hostile to non-Christian, or for that matter, non-obnoxious Christian, customers.

Yes, a religious test on employment is illegal, and it's pretty clear that this guy made it clear that non-Christian, or for that matter, non-obnoxious Christian, people need not apply for jobs.

There is also the whole "Chasing the money changers from the temple," irony thing, but I'm not up on my Christian mythology enough to follow the finer points.

It is worth noting that the bank was the subject of consent enforcement actions in the year before its closing, and were instructed to stop paying dividends when they were always circling the drain.

There is a lesson in all this, though: If you believe that God is on your side, you are always wrong, but if you worry whether or not you are on God's side, you have a possibility of being right.

There is something deeply disturbing and deeply hypocritical about all these folks who seem to think that Christianity is nothing more than a path to wealth.

Seriously, this is nuts. They were out of contact with ATC for over an hour and missed Minneapolis by 150 miles.

This is not a discussion of "crew scheduling".

Maybe one of them is sleeping with the other's wife, maybe they are sleeping with each other, or maybe they were playing a MMORPG like World of Warcraft, or doing a Doom death match over a null modem cable.

It could also be that they just dozed off, the airlines are doing their best to work these guys to death...But a "heated discussion of crew scheduling"?

Well, we know that appears that defense contractors really hate Al Franken's amendment limiting their ability to use binding arbitration to keep things like rapes of employees and discrimination cases from appearing from in open court.

Well, it now appears that, in addition to the 30 pro rape Republicans and the Obama administration, there are now reports Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye is looking at stripping out the amendment.

The first time that I saw footage of the protests at GW Bush's inauguration in 2001 was in Fahrenheit 911.

The MSM was doing bizarre camera shots that were determined to hide it all, and the print media did the same.

For anyone who is at all web savvy, why read the New York Times when the Times of London, or BBC, or Guardian does a better job?

There are a number of problems, such as corporate slant in the news (GE/NBC), but the biggest problem is that newspapers are being managed by people who do not believe in newspapers, but rather by people who are little more than chop shop operators.

This is, as I have said before, you saw this in rail in the 1960s and 1970s, when the companies running railroads decided that it was a dying industry, and so cut people, cut maintenance, cut modernization, and cut infrastructure, and in so doing, they very nearly killed it off.

The news industry has become corporate owned, and acceded to the demands of Wall Street by digesting itself to generate the requisite profit margins, and now, there is very little left by way of quality product for people to want to buy.

I have a call into Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye's office regarding reports that there may be changes to Al Franken's amendment prohibiting the writing of new contracts to contractors who use binding arbitration in discrimination cases, including, "any tort related to or arising out of sexual assault or harassment, including assault and battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, false imprisonment, or negligent hiring, supervision, or retention."

While I am waiting for his office's response, let's have Jon Stewart put it all in perspective:

Well much to the relief of everyone, particularly Natalie, her purse, which held her phone and her inhaler, as well as her song book/journal were recovered.

It turned out to be a taking for practical joke, as opposed to a taking for the purpose of theft. They took her stuff from her cubby in her after-school music class, and put it in her desk for art class, where she would find it.

The chief says the crowd of 800 to 1,000 demonstrators that greeted Beck for his early-evening appearance on Sept. 26 was the biggest protest he's seen in his 32 years as a Mount Vernon police officer.

The city council officially distanced themselves from the Mayor's decision when he made it, and it turns out that they were right, to the tune of almost 18 grand, which is not a small amount of change when the town has a population of 26,232.

There is, and should be, a cost to honoring people whose raison d'être simply self promotion and ego.